Evaluation - Beth Mills

Our project is an opening sequence which a girl is at a cemetery while being there she has flashbacks of her and her friends being held hostage. I worked in a group along side two other people Blake and Nushy. We also had to ask a friend of mine Katherine Whittaker to be an actress in the sequence. During the actual filming I was an actress as well as working the camera to see which shoots and angles would work best I also help decide which shots we should re-shot and which looked good. I edited the film saying which shots would look best where and if we should re-shot some of the scenes along with Nushy and Blake. I wrote the script and the storyboard and created the storyline. During the editing process we decided we needed more shots of the hostage situation to balance the cemetery scenes out. So I went with Katherine my friend to shot more close up shots.

Our genre is thriller. The conventions we have used are titles, characters, natural lighting, music digetic and non-digetic, different shots, setting the scene and place and the genre these are they typical elements to a thriller opening sequence. We made sure we used the typical elements as we no that we can attract the audience with this as we have the statistics to prove it. However, we didn’t want to make a film that was to typical as this would make the film look like the others in the same genre, therefore we used flashbacks, a non-linier narrative by showing the end of the film at the beginning, we also researched to make sure the idea of the film had never been done before. We think it’s vital to do something new to the genre as you are giving them the familiar so that they watch, but in a new way to keep it fresh. Therefore we think the opening sequence was a success because it’s something that the audience have hardly scene before. The social groups we have shown in our opening sequence are criminals and victims with most of the spotlight on the victims this is shown through the actions used by both the victims and the criminal. The actors portraying the victims use the actions of scared and worried look and there body language is defensive and twitchy when the criminal is around. We have also shown the representation of men and women as the man is the criminal, the dominant part of society, and the women are the victims, the weak part of society. The criminal uses the actions of a dominant strong and angry person that shows anger in there eyes through the gas mask. The criminals clothing it typical to someone who is trying to hade, they wear black clothing with a mask. The lighting is dark and sadistic through the use of natural lighting. The cinematography also helps portray the criminal victim’s social group as there are high angles looking down at the victim’s shows them as weak and scared. The low angles on the criminal shows he is strong and aggressive. The sound of crying at the cemetery shows a victim and the sound of struggling at the hostage situation shows people trying to escape. Our product follows the stereotypes that we see in the media as the audience then understand what is being shown to them.

A British independent film company such as film4 would produce this film as they have produced films such as ours with the same sort of storyline before. The audience of our media product would be any gender age 16-25 but may also fall under the age of 25-34, any ethnicity, this is what the typical audience for our genre. This is a good audience to target as it is a wide range audience targeted at people that buy films or go to the cinema to see the film.

To attract our audience we set up equilibrium and disruption in the narrative because you see a woman walking through the cemetery in the day light, this shows the main character being a woman coming to visit a grave this sets the scene as well as telling the audience it’s during the day. This shows the audience the scene and the main character then you disrupt the event to set the story in motion by having the first flash back to the hostage situation. A sense of time has been created by showing the actors in modern day clothing. The flask backs also create chronology as it shows the woman at the grave side crying about what has happened. Tension is used in our sequence by using flashbacks and the increased stress and panic the woman is under. You also never see the killers face so you don’t know what they look like this makes you think about what’s behind the mask. The hostage situation also builds tension with the use of sound to suggest the struggling of people. The music also builds tension as it slowly builds up as the scene builds up. We use tension to set up enigmas which make the audience want to watch. There are messages in our sequence, which suggest that life isn’t easy and horrible things do happen to people and that there is real crime in the world and that there are real people that go through what the hostages went through no matter who you are. There is use of enigmas in our scene such as, who is she? Why are they being held hostage? Who is the killer? Do the hostages no each other? Why is the criminal holding them hostage? Does the killer no his victims? Why does she survive? Does the killer get caught by the police or does he get away? Whose grave is that? ECT. We used enigmas to make the audience want to keep on watching to see what happens next and to answer those questions.

From making this product I have used a variety of technology I’ve never used before such as apple Mac’s, camcorder and tripod, DTP software, using sound clips and video clips and embedding them via pen drive, all these helped make our opening sequence. However as I have never used these before it was hard to get use to them, the editing on the apple Mac was the biggest limitation as there was a lot to learn. There was filming close-ups in the hostage scene we had to do again as the cemetery scenes out weight the hostage scenes also we had to copy and paste the sound from another scene into a few scenes as some didn’t have enough sound for the audience to hear. We also had to use music so we had to find the music then download it on to our project. We used effects such as black and white to help us show the hostage situation being in the past. Using this technology we were able to create our vision of a woman at a grave side having visions of her past.

The opening sequence worked better than our preliminary task because in the preliminary task we had problems with the sound because Nushy was wearing bracelets than made a sound as they were being banged on the table this made the editing process difficult as we didn’t want that sound in the scene so we had to work around that. The shots that we had were hard to fit together in the preliminary task, so, in the opening sequence we made sure the scenes were exactly how we wanted them so we had to make sure we planned it better. There was a shot in the preliminary task the didn’t look realistic the shot was of a hand holding a piece of paper and someone else’s hand taking it from them, the camera angle made the shot look unrealistic therefore not drawing the audience into the film as expected, so we had to make sure the opening sequence looked realistic therefore using a number of camera angles and finding the best one. More enigmas were set up in the opening sequence than in the preliminary task and that made the audience more interested in the sequence than the preliminary task.

Our project turned out better than I expected. The major strength of the project was the enigmas set up. Other strengths were showing the ending of the product at the begging and the music made it sound strange but it was music that portrayed sad emotions. One of our weaknesses were the hostage scenes and the fact that we didn’t have enough of them and the sound we had to copy and paste it would have been more effective if each scene had there own sound of the struggle, but the with the music being over the top it wasn’t obvious to the viewer. I think the opening scene is very close to the real article as the audience feedback suggested that they wanted to find out what happened who the people were and what the killer was killing them for.